“Yeah.”
“Just a little burbled from the ships island. That’s all. The sea’s calm. That meant the ball will be as steady aSARock.”
“Uh-huh.”
Cole sat in silence as Jake jerked the plane to each new heading.
Finally Cole unzipped his survival vest and opened a plastic baby bottle. “Take a swig of this. It’ll help.”
Jake reached for the bottle and put it to his lips. The liquid was fiery and he almost didn’t get it down. “What the hell is that?”
“Brandy.”
“Fuck! I didn’t need that!”
“Well, you sure as hell need something. Now settle down or you’re going to kill us both on the ramp -” Jake recognized he was 200 feet above the 5000-foot altitude assigned and corrected. “You motherfucker!”
“You can do this, Jake.” Cole’s voice was soft and soothing. “You can grease this plane onto a postage stamp if you have to. Be slow and smooth and keep your scan going. Watch your heading. Nothing to it. Nice. You’ve done this hundreds of times.”
Cole pulled the handle to lower the tailhook. “Let’s get on speed. We’ve plenty of gas and the tanker’s right here.”
“Okay, grandma. I’m okay now.”
“Well, I feel like talking. We really smacked those little fuckers tonight. Now all we have to do is get aboard and we’ll be done. You’re going to fly the best goddamn pass those LSO weenies ever saw and catch the three wire. If you couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t be bombing Uncle Ho with you.”
His voice was calm, so matter-of-fact that Jake’s nervousness dissipated. Cole chattered on, “I think I’m going to buy me a stereo the next time we hit Cubi.
“One of those reel-to-reel Jap jobs that has fifty-two buttons
and six or eight of those little Vu needles though. Never had one of those. Maybe I’ll pick up one like Cowboy’s.”
The controller interrupted with instructions.
He was still soliloquizing about stereos when the ship appeared at a mile on the glide path. His commentary switched to the business at hand. “Your wings are level … six hundred foot sink rate… little more power … you have er nailed… looking good….
The wheels hit the steel and the hook caught.
“Did you hit it?” Steiger asked Jake Grafton and Tiger Cole in the passageway after they had finished the mission debriefing. The airmen still wore their fire gear and reeked of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. Jake had his flight suit unzipped to mid-chest, revealing a sodden T-shirt.
Jake shrugged and stared at the bloodstains on his stinging thighs. The quack would have to pull out those metal slivers, which had penetrated the bladders in his G-suit. I guess I finally get a new G-suit, he thought.
Cole put his hand on Abe’s shoulder. “You heard us tell you in there”-he nodded toward the debriefing room-“that the computer had crapped out.” He shifted his helmet bag to his left hand and rubbed his head, obviously uncomfortable.
“The cursor on the radar screen is a thin line, yet it covers two hundred feet of the ground. We were trying to hit a target that was maybe a hundred fifty feet across. But a plane flying at five hundred knots covers that distance in less than a fifth of a second. We dropped the bombs in train to maximize our chances. The minimum interval between bombs is six-hundredths of a second, so at five hundred knots the bombs land fifty feet apart. Our string was only three hundred fifty feet long.” He shook his head.
“The odds just aren’t that good,” Jake added. “If we were real lucky we didn’t hit a hospital or apartment house a half-mile away.”
Steiger bit his lip and examined each drawn face. It had all seemed so neat and easy in the Mission Planning spaces, with charts and lines and photographs. “You did the best you could. I understand,” he said.
The pilot and bombardier trudged off down the passageway, their shoulders drooping.
Jake Grafton sat on the operating table in Sick Bay in his underwear with his legs dangling as Mad Jack worked on his thighs with tweezers, a needle, and disinfectant. Camparelli was astride a chair, his arms crossed on the backrest.
“tell me about the missiles. Steiger says some of them came down at you.”
“Yessir. A couple of them did. But I don’t think they had heat-seekers. I think they were launching from one place and guiding from a radar that was a lot closer to us. We were just too close to the site that was guiding. And they put a missile in the air and waited for the first stage to drop off before they turned on the radar.
They’re getting smarter, or somebody who speaks Russian is helping them.”
“Maybe.” The Old Man ran his fingers through his short hair. “I didn’t think that power plant would be so heavily defended. They hate to lose them, but they really don’t need the juice. Damned rice farmers.” He shook his head.
“That airplane has a lot of holes in it. Nothing major, no structural damage and the wings weren’t hit, thank God, but it’s going to be a couple days before we can use it.”
Jake said nothing.
“I better go tell Steiger to update the intelligence charts.” He stood and addressed Mad Jack’s round back. “Is he going to be able to fly?”
“Yes. Just some pinhole punctures that a Band Aid will cover.”
The skipper left the room.
They don’t need the power plants, Jake thought, Why the hell even bomb them?
In his mind’s eye he saw the rising flak and the SAMs and once again felt the fear, and he imagined the stone capitol building gutted by explosion and fire.
“Relax a little,” Mad Jack said without looking up “or this is going to take all night.”
EIGHTEEN
Three days after their Hanoi raid, Abe Steiger drew Jake aside in mission Planning to show him an intelligence report. The North VietNamese had complain to the international communist press that a bomb had fallen within ten feet of the National Assembly and had severely damaged the facade and had broken all the windows. Because the other seven bombs were not mentioned, Jake and Steiger assumed they had struck in the street in front of the building. The VietNamese complained of a deliberate attempt by “Yankee pirates” to destroy their seat of government and added almost as an afterthought, that three bystanders had died in the blast. The intelligence summary discounted the complaint as pure propaganda or, if there had been any damage, suggested it had been caused by a SAM antiaircraft artillery shell returning to earth.
“Do you think the gomers really believe the attack was intentional?” Steiger asked.
“Does God shave his upper lip? Was Adolf Hitler a fairy? Is there any sex in heaven? How the hell would I know, Abe?”
“Well, it’s something to think about.”
“I hope they’re doing just that. I hope those mothers are racking their brains trying to figure it all out.” Jake told Tiger Cole about the report. “No cigar,” was his comment.
One evening Grafton and Lundeen had a visit from New Guy.
“Want a warm Coke?” Sammy asked him.
“Sure,” New said. “How come you guys never bought a refrigerator?”
“What brings you down to this den of sin and iniquity, anyway?” said Sammy. He tossed a can at New, knowing it would foam over when the flip top was pulled. It did. New wiped his sticky hand on his trousers.
“I’m turning in my wings,” New announced. “I’ve been talking to the Skipper about it and he said I should talk it over with some of the guys, then come back and see him. He wanted me to be sure before I put in the paperwork.”
Sammy and Jake exchanged glances. Most men do not willingly throw away almost two and a half years of
